


words fly up

by serannes



Category: The Raven Tower - Ann Leckie
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Miscarriage, Post-Canon, Post-War, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:08:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23415814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serannes/pseuds/serannes
Summary: You said, "I need a miracle."Years after the dust has settled over Vastai, Eolo returns to ask the Strength and Patience of the Hill for a miracle.
Relationships: Eolo & The Strength and Patience of the Hill
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	words fly up

**Author's Note:**

> “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”  
> ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
> 
> Apologies in advance if there are any innaccuracies or glaring mistakes--it's been over a year since I read the novel, and apart from anything else, I thought I'd better post this fic before I forgot the details of the original entirely.

You came back, in a winter some years later, I think. Time means little to beings such as I. We are not slaves to it as you are. My peripheral awareness extends to the passage not of time, but of people, and people have come and gone, have passed through my borders in their swarms since the Myriad came for her friend. Tides of them, speaking new prayers in new tongues, moving through the ruins of the land that had once lain in the Raven’s shadow. First soldiers, fighters. Even I, who had always been drawn to quiet and peaceful peoples, could not have described them as barbarians. Of course: they were the Myriad’s people, and she had trained them well. They came in streamlined ships and smart uniforms, and did their murdering cleanly.

(She would have had them take me away but I, for reasons I did not quite know myself, remained.)

After they had been and sowed their well-ordered chaos, there was quiet for a time, save for the scavengers: first crows and vultures, then humans swallowing down their fear to pick over the ruins in search of precious pieces. Then, of course, the traders, following the scent of profit; and there was profit to be found, for the more enterprising. The Raven’s people had never been a race of artists, but they had had their craftsmen among them, and plunderers enough to compensate. But there were rumours that the land was cursed, and the people never came as I thought they might. There was a trickle of travelling tradespeople, caravans, nomadic tribes with pocket gods. Never soldiers; soldiers are the most superstitious of the lot. But for the most part I turned in the quiet, alone, as the seasons washed over me. Until the winter that you came.

In the time that had passed since I saw you last, since Mawat fell empty to the floor and you ran beyond the boundaries of my perception, you had changed. You had—grown older, you would say, but such things mean little to me. Here is what I saw: your eyes were tired. Out of their corners, like gossamer threads, branched a myriad fine lines. Were they, I wondered, from years spent smiling?

You were not smiling now. You moved through my consciousness, a deft needle pricking at my studied unconcern. I felt it as you moved closer, closer, to my slowly turning heart. Your skin had thickened, grown darker, and your hands were calloused. You moved more easily now, assuredly, with purpose. You had always walked with purpose, but in those last days, you had seemed lost.

Not so now. Though I made a point of not watching you, of trying to lose myself again in the rhythms of my movement, it did not take me long to realise that you were cutting your determined path towards the once-kingdom’s cold stone heart. Towards me.

Time means little to beings such as I. I have said it, and thus it must be the truth. But still, even as I deliberately did not watch you approach, it seemed I felt each second come and go. Had I had breath, I would have held it. You had once made a similar journey, by the side of your Heir. He was dead now, of course. They all were, but you, and whoever you had managed to tear away from the chaos. I wondered who you had managed to save. Who had perished. Years spent watching these people grow, and fight, and rot in corruption, and in those last hours I had been too drunk on victory and vengeance to watch what happened to them all. Perhaps you would have answers, and though I would not ask for them, you might give them to me anyway. Perhaps you felt you owed me an accounting.

And so, I waited.

***

“I came back,” you said.

_Thank you for remarking on the obvious,_ I replied, and could have cursed myself for doing so. Hadn’t I promised myself not to get drawn back into your world of human affairs? (And—a gnawing, unspoken fear, beneath that faltering determination—would you leave?)

But you did not. Rather, you seemed—amused, an amusement that mixed bitterness and resignation and a steely hardness. It scared me a little. You had never been hard before. Determined, yes, unyielding, stubborn—but never hard. I wondered where you had learned it. In the years since, when you had been travelling in a foreign land with no money and no-one to rely on? In argument with the mad girl you saved? Or—was it I, I who had taught it to you?

Never mind. _I owe you nothing,_ I said. Perhaps you had come for a miracle.

Your not-smile fell off your face. “You do not?” And then you sighed. “No, of course you do not. You’re a god.” That bitterness again. “Gods don’t owe humans anything.”

There was silence for a moment, save for the slow grind of my constant turning. We were still in that same chamber; there was still a stain of blood on the ground where the Lease had lain so many (how many?) years ago. It had remained whole even as the tower crumbled. I think the Myriad would have ordered her soldiers to tear it to the ground, stone by stone, for being my prison for so long, but then I told her I wished to stay. She was incredulous, argued with me. But she had never understood my peculiarities, and she knew it. So she instructed them to keep my prison whole and untouched, so my mechanisms would not rust, so the humans who came by later would not see me any compel me to whatever they would.

“Except that’s not quite true, is it? The Raven owed its people. It owed them for their sacrifices. It failed them in the end.”

_The Raven died,_ I said.

“Replaced by you.”

_Yes._

“Then it still failed. Who shoulders the Raven’s debts?”

_When a god dies, it is none of my concern what they promised when they lived. You think I should have taken up the Raven’s debts? Why should I have? It imprisoned me._

You had been standing; now you dropped to your knees. You have never spoken impetuously, not like your Lease’s Heir. Even now, you sit in silence while you consider your reply. I wait; I am not impatient, of course. “That’s true. Why should you have? It imprisoned you, after all. You had no choice in the matter of service.”

There is more forthcoming. I have watched people for long enough to realise. Your voice rises a little, strengthens. “Of course, neither did _they_. Bound into an agreement made by ambitious ancestors years before they were born. By the time they”— _he_ —“came along, there was no other option but to continue. So tell me, great rock”—I would smile at this address—“tell me why they should have to inherit the Raven’s crimes?”

Ah. But then, you always were more intelligent than your Leaseling. I felt you were wasted in the field. Speaking of: _Where have you been these past years, Eolo?_

You started and stared at the curved face of me that was closest to you. “Where have I been?” Incredulous. Confused. As you were when I first said your name. “Why…?”

Perhaps a human would lie here. _Because I am interested._

You stared at me for a few more seconds, then said flatly, “I travelled. For a while after, with Tikaz. She… it took her a while. There was a farm, an old couple who needed help on the fields; I told them we were newlyweds displaced by the fighting. The wife could keep an eye on Tikaz while I helped the husband out on the farm. They had had a son, a long time ago. He went off to fight.” Fight where, in what war, you did not say. I wondered if you had asked, or if you had feared the answer. “They don’t have gods there, not really. They went into town sometimes and the villagers would talk of gods, but I’m not sure—if they ever really believed. Why should they? The crops grew. Their farm eked on, and we came to help them. They had a carving on the wall of their cottage. His grandfather had carved it, he told me. They knocked on it for luck, when they wanted a good harvest, or more rain, or if a plague of root-eaters appeared in a nearby farm. But they never called it a god. I don’t know. Perhaps the harvest would have been good anyway.”

You lapsed into silence, remembering perhaps. I let you sit for a while, then asked, _What happened?_

“Oh… They died, of old age. Her, then him. We buried them together on the hill, and they left us the farm. The yield wasn’t bad, good enough to live on—good enough that we took in a young one to help, and then another. Ibrahim helped me in the fields, and Asmat helped look after Tikaz when she needed it—not always, Tikaz was a lot better by then. She was—almost as she once was, by the time she died. It was peaceful, in the end; I think she liked life on the farm. She loved our children. And perhaps she even forgave me—in the end.”

Tikaz. I remembered her, remembered her vivacious smile, her vibrancy, her hot temper. Thank the gods she and Mawat never married as some might have wished. In truth, you were much needed, Eolo; a third side to balance out their immolatory pride.

If you were angry, or bitter, or—whatever you were, when you came, you had quieted by now. Calmed, perhaps, by the rhythmic turning of myself. Perhaps it provided enough soothing predictability for you in this moment that you could forget you hated me. And I—Eolo, I was loath to remind you. But I had come to know you too well. The words surfaced, as they always would.

_Eolo, why are you here?_

“I was wondering if you’d ask that.” A wry twist of your lips, before you squared yourself and faced me. “They’re all dead, aren’t they? Do not lie to me.”

_I cannot lie,_ I said, and you raised an eyebrow. _I… do not know. Truly. But if you mean the Raven’s former people… I believe so, yes. Perhaps a few civilians made it out. The companies fighting against the Tel at the boarders dissolved when they heard the news of Vastai’s collapse; the Myr—my friend’s people wiped out a few of them. But though they were many, they did not know this land like your people did. Some fighting men may have escaped, some villagers. There was no organised evacuation. And nobody from Vastai. If there are those out there who survived the fighting and the famine that followed, they are not Inaden anymore. And you would not know them._

You were unreadable. “I see.”

_I am sorry—_ did I falter?— _sorry, that I cannot tell you more. But you suspected, did you not?_

You closed your eyes. “I suspected—no, I knew. Somehow. That you and I were the only ones left.”

Something thrilled through me at your words: you and I. Something fell into place. _And that is why you are here?_

I wondered if you had even admitted that to yourself. You looked caught out. _Oh, Eolo, I never took you for the sentimental type._ Though perhaps I should have.

If you were going to leave, that was the moment. The moment you realised that you were sitting in a room with a cold lump of stone who had caused the collapse of your kingdom and leapt to your feet in disgust. I think you realised it also, and for a moment your frame stiffened, as if preparing for flight. But you did not move. You laid both palms flat on the ground. Smiled a little, as you said, “He was a headstrong fool, wasn’t he.”

_Did you love him?_ I asked, surprising myself. But you had committed yourself, now, come to some kind of internal decision. You tilted your head in consideration. “I followed him. I would have died for him. You could say I loved him, yes, but not in the way people thought. Not that it matters now, I suppose. Seeing as you and I are the only ones left. Though I wonder, sometimes, if Tikaz believed me when I told her. She loved him too. But then, people loved him. That was Mawat.”

_I_ had not loved him, but I was not ‘people’. I had thought him impetuous, entitled, and a “headstrong fool”, as you put it—though I had regarded him not with your exasperated affection, but with something that, facing you, I felt might have been akin to jealousy. I would have laughed at myself, but I am a god. I am millennia old, though such things mean nothing to me. Instead, I spoke a truth. _You have not come here just to reminisce, Eolo._

You straightened and regarded me fixedly. Smiled dangerously. “We spoke of ‘owing’, great rock.”

_A queer concept,_ I said lightly.

“Indeed. And yet.” You said bluntly, “I need a miracle.”

_No. Why?_

“I would trade. Why not?” That dangerous, dangerous smile. Oh, Eolo.

_Would you believe me if I told you that I cannot?_

“Do not lie to me.”

_I told you, I cannot lie._

Your shoulders hold tension. You are used, I think, to directing the tension inwards, keeping the anger or exciting coiled within. Had I not watched you for so long, I would have thought you were perfectly calm as you said, “Not directly, then. To answer your question, I think that if you said it, I would be forced to believe you.” A beat. “But you can’t say it, can you?”

_I thought you were too wise to ask for miracles._

You levelled a stare at me. “Perhaps you overrate me.”

_No,_ I said, shaken for a moment but secure in my knowledge of you. _I do not._

Your gaze left me and hovered at some point in the middle distance. You voice seemed just as far away when you spoke. “I have never bourn children. I never wished to. I never will. But—” Your voice broke for the briefest of moments “—now, I must watch my own child walk the pass between life and death, and I can do nothing. She is still so _young_. Too young to be a mother, I thought, when she first told me. But she was so—so happy. I thought that maybe—”

You fell silent, but I needed no aid to reach past the silence and fill in the rest. I was a cold, immovable rock, the Strength and Patience of the Hill, and I yet I knew the simple facts of human mortality, the terrifying frailty of the mother on the birthing bed. Many times, I had been asked for aid in this one, most awesome thing; long ago, when I was first teaching my humans the act of communication, this was one of the first things they taught themselves to request. And so, I knew without words what you would tell me: a fall, perhaps, or a bleeding, or pains come too early. A mother walking on the edge of life and death for her unborn child. It is the most fundamental and immovable of all the world’s laws: the exchange of life for life.

Eolo, I could see it in your eyes. And something stirred inside me as I contemplated what I must tell you. What would come after that telling.

_I am a god. Nothing constrains me but the laws of my own existence, and those laws dictate that I cannot undo what has been spoken. I can only speak more. Place constraints upon previous conditions. There is a concept I meditated on, during the war. It was why I commanded them to keep me spinning, why I recognised that motion would give me power. In the years since, as I have had lots of time to think, I have thought this concept a name. I call it the law of equivalent exchange._

_Balance is important, Eolo. That it why there are many gods and not just one. And it is why we cannot just conjure miracles out of nothing. We bring about miracles through trade. You humans give worship us, give us power; we give you miracles. These two things are in balance. We could not produce miracles were it not for the gift of your piety. And you would not be pious if we were cold, unmoving, distant gods._

“I do not know, great one. Some might describe you as cold, and distant, and unmoving—well, not that last any more, I suppose.” This last, spoken with a wry smile, over the low noise of my grinding gears.

_Indeed. Long ago, when I was involved in the war in Ard Vusktia, I instituted a new law of trade. I decided to exchange movement, and the power it generates, for power of my own. And I spoke to ensure that so long as I turned, those who asked things of me would have them granted—and I could not refuse them._

_You see where that led me._

“And yet, when I came here to ask from you a miracle, you refused. You could refuse.” Your eyes were searching. This, this was what I did not want to say. But I spoke, nonetheless.

_I realised my mistake. My… naivete. So I spoke again. I will grant the wish of anyone who comes, so long as they are willing to pay in kind. The law of equivalent exchange._

I felt your fingers tighten where you pressed your hand against the stone floor. Everything in this echoing chamber was me, to some extent. I felt it all. You let out a breath. “A life for a life.”

I did not answer.

Your voice rose a little, the slight hitch in volume the only thing betraying you. After all, you were a well-trained soldier once; even decades later, that self-discipline remained. Still and straight as a post, you said, “That’s it, isn’t it?”

You said, “That’s all?”

Your breath stirred the still air. My silence confirmed it. And you nodded, once, like you had expected as much. Perhaps you had. You were always cleverer than your master. Perhaps you and I had both known since you entered this chamber how this would end—despite your doubt, despite my inexplicable reluctance—me, turning, and you, dead on the floor.

You said, “It’s yours.”

I have inured myself to humans. You are fragile, breakable things; I have not formed attachments. But you stood before me, you stubborn crease in the fabric of my universe. You stood still and resolute and firm in your too-fragile flesh, while I rotated. And as I turned, the whole world seemed to shift with me, until (for a fleeting moment) you were the only fixed point on my horizon. The axis around which I revolved.

_Are you certain?_ I asked.

“She is my daughter,” you replied, simply, like that was enough.

I have never thought about what happens to humans after death; I have never cared. Occasionally, there would be those humans to whom I would extend my protection; in those cases, if death threatened, I would approach it as a puzzle to be fixed, as in the case of my earliest turning-crew of slaves, whom I kept alive and fed in spite of others. But beyond that, I have never thought about death. Some of my fellow gods fear the prospect of non-existence with such intensity that they will do anything to avoid it. But I am Strength and Patience of the Hill.

You said, “Show me what to do.”

***

You were shaking, a little, as your fingers undid the buttons of your shirt. That didn’t matter; you were deft enough anyway. You had fought on the front against the Tel, by the side of the headstrong Lease’s Heir. It didn’t matter. You let loose a breath as you reached the bottom, and in one movement pulled the shirt off.

And I? What did I see? There are people who have wanted the answer to that question, I am sure. Pretty village girls who flirted with you along the road, or grudge-driven enemies who might have suspected, who would have liked this piece of ammunition against you. Perhaps they thought that this, at least, would hurt you—you, who are so immoveable, so unshakable; so very, very good at hiding your emotions. We are both made of stone in our ways, you and I.

But I will say honestly—how else could I say?—that all I saw was you, bared to the northern air and shivering slightly. Skin puckered against the cold. I felt your toes curl into the rock beneath you.

And I will not (cannot) lie to you: for a moment, for the barest hint of a second, less than nothing in the eternal span of my existence, I felt a want.

I wanted, I think, to reach out and touch you. To feel your all-too-human warmth, your frailty. Your strength. For brief moments which spanned brief eternities, I wanted, I burned, to slip inside that skin. To have a warm and beating heart made of flesh and blood.

The heart that you slowly bared to me, hands falling to your side, torso uncovered.

(Somewhere, somewhere, a young woman lies trapped in a state between sleep and death. There are bloodied rags heaped in a bowl by the bedside. Her eyelids flicker—)

—and you turn fully towards me. I am reminded of a scene, all those years ago (a warrior and an Heir, falling to the floor, eyes flat and dull and staring).

A latticework of scars covers your side, testament to your humanness. Each one a lifetime’s worth of pain and strength that I shall never know.

(A screaming woman, a mad woman, a woman tearing out her hair and swearing vengeance for the father she—hates? Loves?)

This stillness, it seems, will last forever.

And yet: when the universe shifts around us, it takes you by surprise. Your mouth is opening, perhaps to tell me you are ready, or to ask a question (or to say goodbye?)—and it remains open and soundless as the life drains from your eyes, as your knees buckle, as your head hits the floor with a hollow crack.

Somewhere, somewhere, in the not-too-distant future—tomorrow, perhaps, in the early hours of the morning—a young woman will wake with a start. She will wince at the pain that arches through her body, but she will be, unmistakably, alive.

Perhaps I will watch her grow up, grow old. Perhaps Strength and Patience will no longer sustain me; perhaps it is time to start taking a more active role in the affairs of humans. Perhaps this time, I will not just watch, but guide—this Asmat, foundling daughter of Eolo and Tikaz, now parentless and childless and alone in the world. A blank parchment, ready to fill with words.

What stories will you unspool, Asmat, while I turn and turn in the sealed chamber where your father’s body crumbles into dust?

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as an attempt to test out Rule 34, but took a sharp left turn into PAIN. That bit at the end, where Eolo is stripping? That, dear reader, was my attempt to see if I could write PWP fic for a book about a sentient, all-powerful rock. Hopefully you won't mind what the end result turned out as instead.


End file.
